TITLE: Space Is Minimalist
NAME: Tekno Frannansa
COUNTRY: USA
EMAIL: tek@evilsuperbrain.com
WEBPAGE: http://evilsuperbrain.com
TOPIC: Minimalism
COPYRIGHT: I SUBMIT TO THE STANDARD RAYTRACING COMPETITION COPYRIGHT.
JPGFILE: evrythng.jpg
ZIPFILE: evrythng.zip
RENDERER USED: 


        POV-Ray 3.6.1
        

TOOLS USED: 


        povray editor
        Irfanview (to resize & convert to jpg)
        

RENDER TIME: 


        7h 55m 48s at 7800x5200


HARDWARE USED: 


        Athlon XP 3200+ 2.22GHz 1GB RAM


IMAGE DESCRIPTION: 


Space is minimalist. It is mostly nothing yet it's defined and given meaning by
the tiniest of specks.

The arrangement of this image is inspired by deep-field images from Hubble, with
a little artistic license :)

Note - IRTC file size rules mean I've had to compress this image quite severely,
so there's a few subtle artefacts. A better quality version is available here:
http://evilsuperbrain.com/gallery/finished/index.php?image=evrythng



DESCRIPTION OF HOW THIS IMAGE WAS CREATED: 


I spent a long time working on the emmissive & absorbing media that describes
the galaxy, based on photo reference of milky-way-like galaxies (mostly NGC
1232). Then I put that into a macro with a lot of parameters to vary things
like colour, pattern, noise, etc.

The main galaxy was positioned and has parameters chosen by hand, in fact the
macro was developed for this one galaxy so all the others in the scene are
variations from this source. A second galaxy was placed by hand in the
foreground, and then 8000 others were randomly generated throughout the scene.
All 8000 are visible in the final image, though some are just specks!

In the extreme distance I've used a sky_sphere with some bright dots on it to
fake even more distant galaxies. I created this by rendering a small section of
the scene with full detail galaxies at that distance, so when I created the
fake ones I could make sure they look the same. In the full resolution
7800x5200 version you can just about see that it's a trick, but in this version
you really can't tell.

The hi-res version was rendered for a poster at zazzle.com, then I sampled the
image down in Irfanview using it's highest quality resampling.

I've provided full source so you can play around with it for yourself. Enjoy!